Sentiment Metrics was launched in 2005. Headquartered in Farnborough, UK, Sentiment Metrics is lead by founder Leon Chaddock and Roger Chaddock. The company offerings include ‘Software as a Service’, Reporting and DATA/API.

Social Media Monitoring Key Features

Easy Configuration: Sentiment Metrics collects social conversation from different sources. The relevant mentions are presented in realtime. Gathering data is the most basic function of any social media monitoring application, and Sentiment Metrics is pretty good on this aspect. Query set up is simple and highly effective. Query setup allows for various conditions including region, language, and data channel. It also allows for including and excluding specific urls.

Volume Trending: Social media analysis addresses the question of how the volume of mention is behaving over a period of time, whether the volume is going up or down, and highlights possible peaks and troughs in volume. Sentiment Metrics effectively addresses volume trending and presents the data in graphs and charts for easy comprehension.

Sentiment Benchmarking: The mentions are classified according to the sentiment as positive, negative or neutral. This gives a general trend as to the popularity of the trending topic at any given period of time.

Influencer Identification: Sentiment Metrics identifies the influencers in any topic, and makes it easy for effective engagement with this group of influencers. The top influencers are identified in terms of the number of mentions of the topic, the number of people engaging with the particular influencer, and the perceived authority that the influencer has on the topic.

Team Working: The service offers simple, but effective team working features including multiple users (with different access rights), the ability to create and assign tasks to team members or groups.

Engagement: Sentiment Metrics offer the ability to respond directly to mentions on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks/forums directly from the dashboard. It also provides a “social lookup” feature with a graphical display of the social media profiles of the people engaged in the conversation.

Exporting Data: Exporting of data for further analysis in other applications is quite easy using Sentiment Metrics. The graphs and charts can be exported in picture formats. Similarly raw data can be exported in csv or excel format making it very easy for further analysis in other applications.

Positives

The most attractive benefit of Sentiment Metrics is definitely the intuitive nature of the application. It’s very easy to get started without having much (if any) analytics training. Search queries can be set up using Boolean Search operators and all operations work pretty quickly.

Negatives

If we wanted to nit-pick, we’d say the limited options to view the results while setting up queries and to measure the changes while each term is added is a definite down-side. This also makes cleaning up data more time consuming.

Customers

Businesses and news agencies use Sentiment Metrics for monitoring and analysis. Some of the clients of Sentiment Metrics include Scottish Water, Subaru, Regus, PR Newswire, Aviva, Novartis, GfK, Ogilvy PR Health, Zenith Optimedia, Unisys, morphy richards, and Sony among others.

Price

There are two basic plans being offered by Sentiment Metrics based on number of queries or total volume of mentions. The cheapest plan based on number of queries costs UK£300 a month for 3 queries. Similarly, the same plan is available on data volume also with a volume limitation of 10K mentions per month. Costlier plans include UK£600 a month for 10 queries, UK£900 a month for 20 queries and UK£1200 a month for 50 queries. Similarly costlier plans on data volume include UK£500 a month for 20K mentions, and UK£750 a month for 50K mentions

Sentiment Metrics also offers a Pitch account costing UK£99 per month with no query or data limitation. However, it stores data only for 7 days.

Our verdict

Good for growing businesses and larger enterprises for all their social media monitoring, analysis and engagement requirements. The cost is in the mid-range with cheaper plans that will suit all requirements. It is also an easy-to-use application, quite intuitive in its organization so that even those without much experience can work with Sentiment Metrics. However, there are limited options to check the accuracy while setting up queries.

Verdict:  Sentiment Metrics is a very intuitive mid-range social media monitoring tool.

Brandwatch (www.brandwatch.com) was founded and launched by Giles Palmer in August 2007. Giles continues to lead the company at the position of CEO, and is assisted by Fabrice Retkowsky who is the Chief Technical Officer and Bryan Tookey who is the Chief Operating Officer. Based out of Brighton in the UK, Brandwatch has undertaken continuous product improvement and is currently in its sixth version.

Key Features

Gathering Data: Brandwatch collects social conversations from different sources. The company uses its own Crawler for finding relevant mentions and the mention are presented in realtime. Gathering data is the most basic function of any social media monitoring application, and Brandwatch is pretty good on this aspect. All social media platforms are continuously crawled for relevant mentions and this enables a very comprehensive set of data for the client.

Cleaning Data: Brandwatch has a pretty effective data cleaning system in place. The system automatically identifies mentions in adverts and navigation text, spam mentions, duplicate entries and out of date mentions and cleans them up to present the most relevant set of data for the client.

Analysing Data: Brandwatch does preliminary analysis on each web page the crawler brings up to detect the language, and to match to the query set by the client. Each mention is also analyzed for sentiment detection and for recurring phrase identification. The title and the main content of the page is also extracted and displayed within the system.

Presenting Data: The relevant data on mentions collected by Brandwatch is presented in attractive graphs and charts within each dashboard for individual projects. There is a wide variety of metrics available for comparison and for trend analysis.

Exporting Data: Brandwatch allows exporting of data for further analysis in other application where required. The graphs and charts can be exported in different picture formats. Similarly raw data can be exported in excel format making it very easy for further analysis in other applications.

Positives

The most attractive benefit of Brandwatch is the ease of setting up queries. Search queries in Brandwatch can be set up using simple Boolean Search operators and different searches can be combined to form a single query  (e.g. “X term” AND “Y term”). The query also permits using inclusion and exclusion terms to bring out the most relevant mentions.

Negatives

The only real negative we would highlight is perhaps the accuracy of sentiment classification, as well as spam mentions. However, Brandwatch says this can be improved by human intervention in correcting sentiment and removing spam. This improves the performance of the application as more input is received from clients.

Customers

Businesses and Agencies use Brandwatch for monitoring and analysis. Some of the clients of Brandwatch include MEDIACOM, HSBC, COI, Jam, icrossing, Cisco, Ipsos, MEC, MillwardBrown, OMG4CE, and OMD among others.

Price

There are three plans being offered by Brandwatch. The cheapest plan is a Pitch account costing UK£100 a month. Pitch account allows 100K mentions but queries are stored only for 7 days. The second is the Pro plan costing UK£400 per month. This plan allows 10K mentions a month and unlimited queries. The third is Enterprise plan that comes at a cost of UK£1500 a month. This plan allows unlimited mentions a month and 15 queries.

Our verdict

Good for medium to large accounts for all their social media monitoring and analysis requirements. The cost is in the low-to-mid-range making it relatively costly for small entrants but at the same time effective for medium companies, agencies and brands. It is also an easy to use application with powerful features, quite intuitive in its organization that even those without much experience can work with Brandwatch.

Verdict:  Overall, Brandwatch is an intuitive, affordable and powerful, social media monitoring tool.

The UberVu Dashboard

UberVu was founded jointly by Dan Ciotu, Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca in early 2008. Vladimir is the CEO of the company, Dan is the CTO and Dragos runs Marketing and Customer Development for the firm. Based out of London, the top team consists of about 10 members, and in the three years after inception, UberVu has made pretty strong progress in the field of Social Media Monitoring.

Key Features

• Real Time Harvesting of Data: UberVu collects social communication on realtime basis and allows a company to monitor and interact with people on realtime basis too. It allows the company to monitor conversation continuously and take part in conversation as it happens.
• Easy Engagement: UberVu makes it easy to post comments are replies to mentions as it happens all from UberVu dashboard itself. Twitter, Facebook and other social media places are all accessible through UberVu dashboard for interaction.
• Direct Management of Twitter and Facebook: UberVu dashboard allows customers to engage, monitor and manage their facebook and twitter accounts in realtime.
• Collaboration among Team Members: The dashboard allows assigning of tasks to each member of the team and effective monitoring of action taken.
• Measuring Impact: UberVu offers actionable insights through analytics. Data is presented in a number of easy to understand metrics, which can be downloaded as custom reports.

Analytics on UberVu

Positives

The most useful benefit of UberVu is the ability for realtime social media monitoring integrated with easy engagement. The application allows you to monitor mentions, gauge sentiments, watch trends, and take immediate actions by directly engaging with people who are talking.

Negatives

The most glaring downside is the limitation in setting up an effective search query. Search queries are grouped into streams with very limited scope for combining different conditions or search parameters. And different streams have to be combined to get total number of mentions.

Customers

Businesses and Agencies use UberVu for monitoring and engagement. Some of the clients of UberVu include Nestle, NBC, Ogilvy, BBDO, PayPal, Thomas Cook, BASF, Saatchi & Saatchi, Wunderman, ViewsHound, Strictly Social, Underground BLC, and Silicon Valley PR among others.

Live stream view on UberVu

Price

There are four plans being offered by UberVu. First is Solo costing about US$50 a month. This plan allows only one user per account, 5 search streams and unlimited number of mentions. The second is the Plus plan costing about US$180 per month. This plan allows 5 users and upto 30 search strings with unlimited mentions. The third is Team plan that comes at a cost of about US$400 a month. This plan allows 15 users and upto 75 search strings with unlimited mentions. Update: Ubervu have changed their pricing model in recent weeks, so the details above are now incorrect. They now offer a single, tailored pricing model that starts at $499 per month. This puts them firmly in the medium-price range of self-serve monitoring tools, rather than “budget”, but also enables them to provide more hands-on support.

UberVu also gives Enterprise accounts the cost of which needs to be arrived at by directly contacting the account executives.

Our verdict

Good for an early entrant into social media monitoring. It is low cost compared to other established applications in the market. It is also an easy to use application, quite intuitive in its organization that even those without much experience in the use of such an application can find his way with UberVu.

Verdict:  Ubervu is an intuitive and affordable, entry-level social media monitoring tool.

Segmenting Foursquare check-in data is much easier than segmenting other social media data as check-in data contains context, has some structure and is short, and I was able to take about 30% of the close to 20 million check-ins over the last 3 months and put them into one category or another.  Here’s some examples using an approach I developed around Radian6′s capabilities to find influential individuals.

College Influencers:

1. @BigBoi – http://bigboi.com/ - 292,536 Followers
2. @tommytrc – http://www.tommytrc.com – 122,872 Followers
3. @steelers      - http://www.steelers.com – 123,096 Followers

Restaurant / Dining out Influencers (turned out to be the same 3 people for Sports Influencers):

1. @levarburton – http://levarburton.com – 1,659,114 Followers
2. @Agent_M       – agentmlovestacos.com/ – 1,408,664 Followers
3. @AmyJoMartin - digitalroyalty.com – 1,270,197 Followers

Museum Influencers:

1. @CoryBooker – http://www.facebook.com/corybooker -1,096,600 Followers
2. @wallpapermag – http://www.wallpaper.com – 473,589 Followers
3. @RYOtheSKYWALKER – http://www.bushhunter.jp/ – 293,341 Followers

To learn more, see this post at WebMetricsGuru.com or check out my Social Media Analytics book.

Several months ago I ran some tests on the impact of Facebook Likes on Google Rankings. After receiving several e-mails and tweets asking whether Google +1s have any impact on rankings, I decided to run some similar experiments in order to give a more conclusive answer.

I began my Google +1 experiment by taking 35 URLs across six unique domains with various traits: a mixture of indexed/unindexed, had links/no links, home pages/deep pages, had social signals/no social signals etc. All of these domains had experienced no significant changes in rankings for a while, i.e. the main keywords that I was tracking had not moved for a fair amount of time and there was very little other activity being done on them.

I then requested some +1s from a variety of different groups of people and monitored the log files, rankings, Google Analytics, and Webmaster Tools’ Google +1 section to spot any interesting trends.

Results:

Analysis:
Although it has only been one week since starting the test, and the sample size (35 URLs across six domains) is not at all statistically significant enough to make any rash conclusions, my general observation is that +1s from genuine Google+ users do improve rankings. However, in the case of URL 1, which was the only URL that was not indexed, the +1s had no impact on getting it indexed. The scale of some of the ranking increases was also very varied: one of the URLs increased the ranking for a targeted keyword from 75 up to 27 in Google UK. Another Keyword increased from 42 to 18, and another increased from 8 to 6.

Google+1s Impact on Traffic:
Here is a Google Analytics screenshot for URL 6 (the domain where +1s were spread across 30 URLs). As you can see, after relatively stable traffic there does appear to be a slight overall increase in traffic – although it’s hard to say whether this is was caused by the +1s or if it is just correlation. Either way, it hasn’t smashed the site’s traffic, but it is a noticeable increase (from ~185 visits a day to ~225).

To learn more about his experiment and how to harness the power of social seo, join his session at Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 London on September 19th.

Based on qualitative marketing research I have conducted using the social media analytics platform, Marketwire Sysomos, I’d say that social marketers are much more interested in mastering chosen social marketing platforms, integrating social media with their existing campaigns, and are forgoing, for now, measuring their social media ROI. This finding about the readjusted importance of ROI was totally unexpected, given the strong focus put on it by marketing experts, especially Olivier Blanchard of the BrandBuilder blog, who have turned Social media ROI into a mantra.

I shared my approach to online research in my new book on what social media analytics can accomplish.  The book aims to help businesses and individuals disambiguate the confusing decisions all marketers must now face between several competing measurement and marketing platforms, and choose the right one for their needs. Marketers should then be able to move forward, deploying streamlined social marketing programs that work and are measureable; whereas before, poor choices in technology, marketing process and people constrained the marketing successes that it was possible to achieve using social media.

The findings presented in Figure 1 reference the top 10 questions social marketers most want answers to, as featured in the 2011 Social Media Marketing Report by Michael Stelzner, the founder of The Social Media Examiner (Stelzner’s rankings are in the gray column while mine are in the green column). Michael Stelzner conducted his primary research using readers of his publication, and published it last April. He used an online questionnaire that was answered by 3300 respondents, or 4% of the 94,000 registered users of his Social Media Examiner online publication.

On the other hand, my research into the top questions social marketers had was conducted entirely using MarketWire Sysomos.  I looked at the total online social mentions between recorded between 8/1/10-7/31/11 using a set of 10 specially constructed search queries as detailed on my WebMetricsGuru.com blog.  For the rest of this report, the 2011 Social Media Marketing Report will be referred to as SMM 2011.

Figure 1 –SMM-11 Top 10 questions social marketers want to know vs. Online mentions using MarketWire Sysomos

My findings show that offering intermediate and advanced training programs that help marketers learn how to leverage social media marketing, as part of the existing business marketing mix, is exactly what marketers want most now, and not ROI reporting.  While Return on Investment tracking is still important to most social marketers, it is considered much less so than normally portrayed.

My take on the disparity between mine and Michael Stelzner’s findings suggest that social marketers have matured in their expectations and understandings around social media marketing, have now begun to articulate their business needs, goals and expectations in a more realistic light than they had in the past (the past had been dominated by social media ROI goals that marketers were unable to meet for a variety of reasons, including the immaturity of the monitoring platforms and disparate goals of marketers).

Another way to look at the disparities — businesses realize hard selling does not work well within social channels and decided to step back, put ROI on the backburner, for now, and wait until all the data needed for marketing ROI is able to be collected, in the right format. Instead, social marketers are now focusing on what matters the most to their bottom line, defining success in terms of what they do, not on ROI – deploying social programs that work to expand business and integrate within the rest of the marketing mix.

Marketers also want to understand just how much time they should spend doing social marketing on a weekly basis, and this question has a higher ranking in my findings than SMM 2011, based on Figure 1.  Perhaps, by using Sysomos, instead of a solicited questionnaire, I was able to come up with a more comprehensive ordering and set of answers than Stelzner did.

There are several other issues social marketers want to know more about, including how to work with “big data”;  marketers may now need to handle large data sets, and use new platforms that are still evolving such as Google/ITA’s Needlebase, to take advantage of all the information social media can now provide them.  In addition, a very strong interest in upcoming trends around social marketing; this is a subject that I will explore in a future post on Monitoring Social Media. In the meantime, I’d welcome your comments.

Post by Matthew Vattoli

This is the second in a series of guest posts from Marshall Sponder, author of Social Media Analytics (2011 McGraw Hill). You can read the introduction to this series here.

My book included an entire chapter on Measuring Influence. I felt a book on social analytics would be incomplete without a chapter on Influence – but as posited in the chapter – a whole book could have been written on Influence (in fact, that book has been written, by Philip Sheldrake, it’s called The Business of Influence, which I’m looking forward to reading soon).

According to Gary Lee, CEO of mBLAST.com, measuring influence is not new and has been discussed for over 100 years and is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6:

In a 1898 article “L’opinion et la conversation,” later reprinted in his book, L’opinion et la foule, Gabriel Tarde wrote that conversations among people were what really allowed the media (aka newspapers) to survive. He wrote “if no one conversed, the newspapers would appear to no avail … because they would exercise no profound influence on any minds. They would be like a string vibrating without a sounding board.

Tarde felt strongly that only conversations among people about things they read in the media can complete the full cycle of “news,” as individuals read information, talk about it with others, and sway public opinion. Tarde’s was the first identified academic study of how people influence others. To go back even further, we could point to the book of Exodus in the Bible, where Moses was instructed to convey messages to the Israelites, who were wandering in the desert for 40 years; according to Lee, this may be the first published account of using an “influencer” to spread news.

I have to admit, Moses doing an early form of Public Relations by leading Israelites out of Egypt drew a smile as I read my chapter of influence  (and still does); but if anyone was ever an influencer, it’s the founders of the major world religions such, Influencers such as Moses, Jesus, Buddha and so on – you can’t get much more influential than that!

…. But in order to measure influence, we need a benchmark to measure against; and, as of today, definitions and benchmarks for influence are undefined. According to Mike Arauz, a senior strategist at the firm Undercurrent, located in New York, “The most successful influencers [are those] who have found a way to channel their popularity and reputation into collective action. Perhaps they have a tribe of readers who buys every one of their books when they come out, like Seth Godin. Maybe they’ve used Twitter to inspire evangelists and get loyal customers, like Zappos.”

In Chapter 6, I took on the challenge of trying to measure Chris Brogan’s influence and how it helped spread the word with Stever Robbins’s 2010 book Get-It-Done-Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More? which Chris Brogan helped promote last year.   I tried to measure just how much Brogan’s message swayed his followers, and when you read my book you’ll see how I measured that.

Perhaps it will give you some tools to measure your own influence, or the influence of others.

This is the first in a series of guest posts from Marshall Sponder, author of Social Media Analytics (2011 McGraw Hill). Over the coming weeks Marshall will be sharing excerpts from his book and providing insights into influencer analysis, sentiment detection, and other key aspects of social media monitoring.

I’m pleased to say that my book is now on Amazon and will be available from September.  To kick off this series I thought I ought to the outline of the book and then do another post about a specific aspect of the book, immediately after this one. So here’s the summary:

Executive Outline of Social Media Analytics
Preface – Marshall Sponder
Forward – Avinash Kaushik

Chapter 1 – Chapter 1 – The Conundrum of Social Media: Where’s the ROI?

Chapter 1 contains a brief history of social media based on coverage in WebMetricsGuru.com and the interviews contained in the manuscript. In addition I examine various arguments around Social Media ROI and the differences between self serve platforms such as Radian6, Sysomos and BrandWatch, and more customized offerings from Synthesio, Integrasco and Attentio.  A look at Havana Central and my Ultraviolet Data paper with Compete.com is included. Engagement as a metric is examined as well.

Chapter 1 also contains a case study of Lithium and Vistaprint; Vistaprint achieves knowledge of total ROI on all online transactions using a combination of Lithium Social Media and in house Web Analytics and CRM platforms.

Chapter 2 – Targeting Your Customers: Using Data to Find Your Customer
Examines various ways to target audiences using a combination of audience profiling tools and Facebook;  Chapter 2 includes a case study of Converseon and Telstra around HTC mobile phone usage in Australia and the use of Social Media Analytics to shape Social Media Strategy.  There is also an in-depth look at viral video tracking.

Chapter 3 – Tracking International: Multicultural Social Media

Chapter 3 examines monitoring and measuring Social Media Internationally through various languages, dialects, slang and linguistic variations with a special focus on China.  Chapter 3 briefly looks at the Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange brand campaign that ran late last year and asked fans to swap their nightlife with another city (14 international cities were in the campaign).  An interview with Brandtology (possibly the very first) is presented that took place at the end of 2010 with Alvin Chan (CTO), Kelly Cho (Marketing and Emerging Technology) and Jay Vasudevan (a friend of the author and Regional Social Media Consultant for the Americas).

An introduction to the Case Study of Synthesio and Accor Hotel chain is also in Chapter 3 – the rest of the case study is presented in Chapter 11.  The Synthesio case study is one of the most detailed in the book and provides nuts and bolts steps and methodologies, timelines, as well as problems encountered.   The author (me) takes a stab at examining why translation services are not performing and excelling in Social Media Monitoring.

Chapter 4 – Online Social Intelligence: Extracting Signal from Noise

This chapter examines the issues of finding signal and separating out the noise in Social Media mentions.  The chapter looks at “micro signals” and examines the Google – ITA acquisition, pondering if the semantic platform Needle and Needlebase were the real treasure.   An interview with Chase McMichael, CTO of InfiniGraph is presented.

Chapter 5 – Friends, Fans, and Followers: Determining Their Worth

One of the most popular chapters of the book, I spend the entire chapter looking at ways content creators have valued their tweets, posts, facebook friends, facebook fans, followers, etc.  A case study of Buzzdetector (an Italian Social Media Monitoring platform) and the Associazione Canili Lazio, a nonprofit organization for the fair treatment of dogs, is presented in this chapter.  The Radian6 and Beachbody case study is also presented at the tail end of Chapter 5.  The chapters end with a call for integration and prophesy that it will happen in 2012.

Chapter 6 – Influence: Finding It and Measuring It

This chapter is all about how influence is measured in Social Media and the prevailing platforms that offer influence modules, including Radian6, Sysomos, Alterian SM2, PeekYou, FollowerWonk, Klout, mPACT, TRAACKR, etc.   Chris Brogan’s attempt to promote Stever Robbin’s book on 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More is examined using Sysomos. The author’s own ideas on how to measure influence are presented along with a profile (interview) with Gary Lee, CEO of mBLAST.  Various additional offline signals that are collectable via crawlers are suggested as markers for influence and a summary of the field is presented.  The author admits, a chapter on Influence could really be turned into a whole book in of itself, and anything said in this chapter will probably need to be updated before the ink dries, as the field of Influence Mapping is so dynamic and ever changing.

Chapter 7 – Scorecarding: Collecting and Understanding Social Media Data

Chapter 7 examines the basic thoughts on how to set up Scorecarding for Social Media Analytics – and is greatly contributed to by Gary Angel of Semphonic.com.  The chapter examines various agency scorecards such as the Razorfish Fluent, and the DFI scorecard that I have written about at Webmetricsguru.com in the past.  A list of questions to ask of clients and stakeholders was presented in this chapter as well, to make analytics implementation more meaningful and complete.  A case study of Complex Media and InfiniGraph finishes off the chapter.

Chapter 8- Advanced Social Analytics: Implementation and Monitoring Scorecards

This chapter gets into the nuts and bolts of scorecard creation and draws on a Semphonic Case Study with 10 data scores that were eventually score carded into a series of executive dashboards. Suggestions on how to segment data are presented, maturity levels of clients, and several examples of advanced scorecards from Semphonic are presented in the remainder of the chapter, along with an interview (profile) of Gary Angel, CTO of Semphonic.

Chapter 9 – Going Beyond Monitoring: Content Creation and Content Tracking

Chapter 9 examines ways to track content that is created for Social media, and looks at ways to benefit from the intelligence gained from social analytics platforms (as a feedback loop).  Along with the capabilities of several monitoring platforms in this respect, a case study of the University of Texas Anderson Cancer Center is presented from Alterian.  The chapter ends by looking at some additional platforms on the horizon that are measuring the value of content such as Visual Revenue LLC, Adaptive Semantics (AOL Huffington Post) and InfiniGraph.

Chapter 10 – Monitoring Tools and Technologies: The Limits of what we can collect

Chapter 10 examines the differences between self serve and boutique listening platforms – it is the crux of the book and includes a platform case study with Brandwatch CEO Giles Palmer on how his platform was built from the bottom up.  The chapter also looks at the limitations of keyword based queries and focuses on the limitations and scaling issues of self serve systems.  The bulk of the Synthesio and Accor case study is also presented here.
Chapter 11 – Convergence: Mashing up data from disparate sources

Chapter 11 focuses on how to mash up data and presents an in-depth case study of Integrasco and Vodafone UK.  We also look at Google Analytics, QR codes,  etc.  Two  additional case studies  are presented, of Econsultancy and LinkedIn  and of Famecount – a UK based rating service for Twitter and Facebook.

Chapter 12 – Where we’re going: The Future of Social Media Analytics

The last chapter is devoted to the future of where Social Media Analytics is going -  case studies of Behive Systems, a Hong Kong consultancy who worked with QR codes,  and an interview with Bob Pearson, CTO of WCG end the chapter, along with some predictions from the author.

Following successful conferences in London, San Francisco, Miami and Last Vegas, I’ll be hosting Social Media Marketing & Monitoring 2011 in New York on 12th October. While the primary focus of the conference is social media marketing – including sessions on Google+, social commerce, story-telling in social media, Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and location marketing – it will also include an insightful session from social media monitoring company, Brandwatch, plus a discussion on Influencer Analysis & Engagement, led by Pierre-Loic Assayag, Founder & CEO of Traackr.

Brandwatch worked with games company, Activision, to monitor the launch of the latest Assassins Creed game - which was the biggest ever marketing promotion of a video game. In addition to tracking conversations before the launch, to hone the marketing messages and target the best channels (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook etc.), Brandwatch monitored the sentiment (positive/neutral/negative) and number of mentions (buzz) throughout the campaign and were able to identify the content releases – such as trailer video clips – that worked, and the ones that didn’t.

By involving a team of social media monitoring experts in the marketing process from start to finish, Activision were able to map the life-cycle of the campaign and create a blue-print for the successful launch of a video game in different markets. This could save them millions of dollars on their next launch. I’d say that was money well spent.

Another key marketing investment for companies today is influencer analysis and engagement. Traackr is one of the leading exponents of this art, which, although still controversial, is generating returns for many brands. Traack helps you to identify influencers according to their reach (e.g. # of fans/friends/followers), resonance (how much their messages are share/retweeted etc.) and relevance (how closely they are associated with your industry/services). They then monitor what these individuals are saying about your company or industry, and help you to connect and engage with them.

At SMM11 New York we’ll be exploring how influencer analysis works, the issues that measuring qualities such as “influence” and “relevance” raises, and the opportunities successful influencer engagement offers businesses. Speakers at the conference include strategic marketer, Trey Pennington, Christine Perkett (“One of the 100 Most Powerful Women on Twitter”) and Asif Khan, President of the Location-based Marketing Association. Early Bird Tickets for the conference are on sale now.